Todd Alan Gitlin (born January 6, 1943)[1] is an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written about the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications.

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Gitlin became a political activist in 1960, when he joined a Harvard group called Tocsin, against nuclear weapons. He went on to become vice-chairman and then chairman of the group. He helped organize a national demonstration in Washington, February 16–17, 1962, against the arms race and nuclear testing. In 1963 and 1964, Gitlin was president of Students for a Democratic Society. He helped organize the first[citation needed] national demonstration against the Vietnam War, held in Washington, D.C., April 17, 1965, with 25,000 participants, as well as the first civil disobedience directed against American corporate support for the apartheid regime in South Africa—a sit-in at the Manhattan headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank on March 19, 1965.[2] In 1968–69, he was an editor at and a contributor to the San Francisco Express Times, an underground newspaper, and wrote regularly for underground papers via Liberation News Service.

After teaching part-time 1970–77 at the New College of San Jose State University and the Community Studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he served for 16 years as professor of sociology and director of the mass communications program at UC Berkeley, then for 7 years as a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University.

Since 2002, he has been a professor of journalism and sociology, and since 2006 also chair of the Ph.D. program in Communications at Columbia University, where he also teaches the Core course Contemporary Western Civilization as well as an American studies course on The Sixties.[5] He actively opposed both the Gulf War of 1991 and the Iraq War of 2003. He vocally supported the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the occupation of Afghanistan in 2002.[6]

In his early writings on media, especially The Whole World Is Watching, he called attention to the ideological framing of the New Left and other social movements, the vexed relations of leadership and celebrity, and the impact of coverage on the movements themselves. He was the first sociologist to apply Erving Goffman's concept of "frame" to news analysis, and to show Antonio Gramsci's "hegemony" at work in a detailed analysis of intellectual production. In Inside Prime Time, he analyzed the workings of the television entertainment industry of the early 1980s, discerning the implicit procedures that guide network executives and other television "players" to make their decisions. In The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, a memoir and analysis combined, he developed a sense of the tensions between expressive and strategic politics. In The Twilight of Common Dreams he asked why the groups that constitute the American left so often turn to infighting rather than solidarity. In Media Unlimited, he turned to the unceasing flow of the media torrent, the problems of attention and distraction, and the emotional payoffs of media experience (which he called "disposable emotions") in our time. In Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street, he distinguished between "inner" and "outer" movements, analyzing their respective strengths and weaknesses.

In The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left, The Sixties, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked with Culture Wars, Letters to a Young Activist, and The Intellectuals and the Flag, Gitlin became a prominent critic of the tactics and rhetoric of the Left as well as the Right. Supporting active, strategically focused nonviolent movements, he emphasizes what he sees as the need in American politics to form coalitions between disparate movements, which must compromise ideological purity to gain and sustain power. During the George W. Bush administration, he argued that the Republican party managed to accomplish this with a coalition of what he called two "major components—the low-tax, love-business, hate-government enthusiasts and the God-save-us moral crusaders" but that the Democratic Party has often been unable to accomplish a pragmatic coalition between its "roughly eight" constituencies, which he identifies as "labor, African Americans, Hispanics, feminists, gays, environmentalists, members of the helping professions (teachers, social workers, nurses), and the militantly liberal, especially antiwar denizens of avant-garde cultural zones such as university towns, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and so on." (from The Bulldozer and the Big Tent, pp. 18–19).

In the 2010 book The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, he and Liel Leibovitz traced parallel themes in the history of the Jews and the Americans through history down to the present.[7][8]

He has published three novels: The Murder of Albert Einstein (1992), Sacrifice (1999), and Undying (2011). "Sacrifice" won the Harold U. Ribalow Award for the best fiction on Jewish themes. His novel, The Opposition, is forthcoming. It follows a group of 1960s activists through the decade.

My generation of the New Left — a generation that grew as the [Vietnam] war went on — relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss. All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked political correctness of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost — we squandered the politics — but won the textbooks.

— Varieties of Patriotic Experience

... those who still cling to gauzy dreams about untainted militancy need to remember all the murders committed in the name of various radical ideologies that accomplished exactly nothing for the victims of racism.